Why Thunderstone Quest?

At AEG, we have always been great fans of Thunderstone. Not only because it is one of our earliest game products in the board and boxed-game business, but also because we love games with a rich theme. We also love games that involve building an “engine”.

Brilliantly designed by Mike Elliott back in 2009, Thunderstone delivered on all aspects and, of course, continues to hold a place in hearts. It is a great game.

So when we were thinking about our games for 2017 and the issue of re-imagining Thunderstone came to the table, we all jumped at the opportunity. Thunderstone: Quest is the result.

When we began development, we wanted to look at Thunderstone and see if there was an opportunity to make a new game that had even more theme. We hit upon a number of concepts, to give the game a fresh new feel, and we want to take the opportunity to tell you about them, and why we like Thunderstone Quest so much.

The first thing to tell you is that we are very much releasing this product as a story. The game will come with a series of predefined quests that you work your way through, with an unfolding story attached to each. The story will give players new challenges and allow them to learn the game through a range of experiences, introducing slightly more complex combos later in the quests. Of course once you have done that, you will be able to play Thunderstone Quest with random set ups, very much as you can with classic Thunderstone.

In classic Thunderstone much of the early game was spent in the village, resting training, preparing. We feel that the strongest part of the theme comes from questing in the dungeon.

In Thunderstone Quest we wanted to make the early part of the game more dynamic, we want the deck refinement process to be more active. So for many existing Thunderstone fans this will feel different. You will be spending time in the village but the game gets moving fast, with some basic wilderness exploration. Your starting party of heroes, rookie adventurers, will level up quickly or even be part of your final party in some cases. You will of course need a few additional weapons and perhaps some spells, and careful purchases in the village will be important, but those adventurers will be learning on the job!

The dungeon is bigger now and players will have a wider choice of monsters to fight, and the difficulty of those monsters scales. But light takes on a very significant role. Each monster will reside in a “room”, and in some cases those rooms will have a darkness factor, so you will need light to literally move round in the dungeon. Players will need to build light into their strategy to be able to get from room to room to fight monsters. And each room may have a different challenge associated with it as well.

There are many other features in the game – monsters dropping treasures, players start the game with support of particular guilds and choose to undertake side-adventures in search of fabulous rewards. At the end of the game players will earn victory points based on the experience they have earned, and the cards in their deck.

As the next few weeks pass by we will reveal more of what is in store in Thunderstone Quest. We hope you are looking forward to it as much as we are!